Retail shrink comes mostly from customer stealing, cashier sweet-hearting, and employee theft. Item substitution fraud occurring at Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminals, such as Self-Service Checkouts (SSCOs) and Cashier-Assisted Checkouts, is one of the key shrink issues. Perpetrators may commit the fraud in many ways such as by checking out an expensive item (e.g., a bottle of bourbon) as a cheap produce item (e.g., banana). For example, rather than scanning a barcode of an item, the item is placed on a scale, an item type is keyed in or otherwise selected such as bananas, and the item is priced at checkout by weight rather than by the product barcode. Data processing solutions have been implemented on computing devices at POS terminals to detect such possible occurrences of such item substitution fraud and other forms of fraud. However, a detection of possible occurrence of fraud is just that, a possible occurrence of fraud, as the detection is typically a probability of fraud rather than an absolute detection of fraud.
When a possibility of fraud occurrence is detected, a security event is typically triggered at the POS terminal of the occurrence. This may include one or more of locking the terminal until a monitoring employee is present, notification of a monitoring employee to watch the terminal closely, on-site or off-site review of video of the transaction, among other possible security events. Handling such security events can be time consuming and take personnel from performing other tasks and assisting other customers. As a detected possible occurrence of fraud is a probability and probability thresholds are used to determine when to declare a possible fraud occurrence, false detections are common. Such false detections can lead to wasted resource utilization investigating possible fraud occurrences, degradation of customer experiences, and employees learning to dismiss possible fraud notifications due to many false detections.
At the same time, a probability of fraud considered in view of a threshold may also lend such solutions to missed fraud detections. While an absolute detection of attempted fraud can be quite difficult, improvement of current fraud-detection solutions at POS terminals is desired.